The Florida Supreme Court and Death Penalty Appeals

In the 1972 case of Furman v. Georgia, 1 the United States Supreme Court narrowly voted to invalidate all death penalty statutes then in existence.While each Justice wrote a separate opinion, the death penalty statutes were criticized repeatedly for allowing unguided discretion.This, it was believed, led to the imposition of death sentences in an arbitrary and capricious manner.Within four years of Furman, thirty-five states had enacted new death penalty statutes.These new statutes were of two general types: those legislating a mandatory death sentence for everyone convicted of a certain crime and those specifying new rules to guide juries and judges in deciding who should receive a death sentence.Five of the new statutes were reviewed by the United States Supreme Court in 1976.The Court held that mandatory capital punishment statutes were unconstitutional, 2 but it upheld those containing guided discretion provisions. 3 The history and content of these decisions have received detailed analysis elsewhere.